Boards

(maybe 2014 / rolling / audit / what have you been to / what are you looking forward to type thing?)

So I live hear the Horniman and I bloody *love* it and they've got some cool thing about animal survival in "extremes" which looks really ace and I'm thinking about becoming a member even though it's usually free to get in and their temporary exhibitions don't cost much.

Also I wanna go to that architecture thing at the Royal Academy. Any more for any more?

It really does have something for all ages. If you go often, it's definitely worth becoming a member.

Last week I went to The Photographer's Gallery for a trio of big names in the shape of David Lynch, William Burroughs and Andy Warhol. It's usually free, but they have decided to charge a fee for this one - the princely sum of £4 (it's free Thursday evenings). It's good - I found the Andy Warhol stuff a bit boring, but the Lynch stuff is soundtracked by some of his own work which makes it suitably doomy, and the Burroughs stuff is fascinating.

Hannah Rickard's new exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. It was great, actually - essentially it was looking at the responses people had to unusual natural events e.g. the Northern Lights, seeing mirages on lakes in Canada and this sort of thing. It was very cool, definitely worth repeat visits I think. She also did a thing where she slowed down the sound of thunder/lightning to 8 minutes, had it transcribed for a classical ensemble, then sped up a performance back to 7 seconds or whatever so that the sound of the storm was being made by the instruments instead.

The art is very focused no the 'experience' (didn't phrase that very well but hope you know what I mean?) so there are lots of sounds and real attention to the lighting...e.g. the artist has tinted the windows green and purple so that the light coming in to the bit about the Northern Lights has this really strange colour palette. It's cool.

Love MAO - it's a great little gallery, and a top cafe! Just a very nice place to be. And awesome that it's free too.

And I also went to the Design Museum – there's a Paul Smith exhibition which I wasn't too fussed about but upstairs there's a brilliant show called In The Making, where everyday objects have been stopped in their production process, so some look recognisable but unusable, or some look totally unlike the thing they're going to become.
http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/2014/in-the-making

oh sheeldz I went to the British landscape photography exhibition at the National Theatre last weekend and one of the categories / prizes was sponsored by British Rail and so it was all lovely photos of trains and "the British landscape" and they were really good and I thought of you.

I'm going to see a guy from Microsoft talk on Thursday. This is the blurb, it sounds really interesting:

Are we designing behaviours or designing for behaviours? - More and more of us are spending time working out how we help co-ordinate a myriad of human interactions with digital systems to create great human experiences. As the technology starts to visibly disappear to let us go back to our lives, are we going back to our own lives or ones engineered for us? Are we digitally engineering new behaviours or are we designing systems that are more tailored to us as individuals and therefore removing friction. Where’s the line? What right do we have? I’ll share some perspectives on how we’re exploring this today, but more importantly I hope we have an opportunity to share each other’s perspectives and open up what is a debate I see coming in society beyond the current unpacking of privacy.

Birmingham:
IKON Gallery have an ace David Tremlett exhibition on the top floor at the moment, 3 Drawing Rooms, which runs until the end of April. And a new exhibition below this which opens tomorrow from Jamal Penjweny, about life in Iraq since the wars. Might be quite interesting.

BMAG have the new Grayson Perry Tapestries which are great (free) and a cool Photorealism exhibition which was only a few quid.

Liverpool:
Walker Gallery's collection of early David Hockney sketches and prints was pretty fascinating.

FACT have an interesting exhibition called Time and Motion about working procedures and efficiency since the industrial age, really made you think about the current 'work/life' balance.

Sheffield:
The Chris Watson soundmap of the city at MuseumsSheffield is ace, but it's only on until Sunday!